Adolescence The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory

Adolescence KAMALUDEEN MOHAMED NASIR Nanyang Technological University, Singapore he terms “adolescents” and “youth” have oten been used interchangeably. However, social theorists have preferred the latter because of the biological determinism embedded in the study of adolescence found in much psychological research. Scholars today recognize that much of the identity formation attributed to adolescents is a matter of social construction. For example, it has been argued that the aluence in urban societies has created the prolonging of this phase between childhood and adulthood, resulting in the proliferation of youth cultures. Modern societies have spent millions of dollars advocating the advantages of looking and being “youthful.” One might point out, as Pierre Bourdieu (1993) has done, that “youth is just a word” and not particularly useful as an analytical category. Bourdieu privileges the primacy of class as more important than an all-age group analysis. By this, he favors placing the young and old in one category of analysis because diferentiating them masks the fact that both share many commonalities and disregards the historical and social construction of youth as a category. Undeniably, youth is an elusive category that is diicult to deine. If we were to take a survey of diferent communities in the world, we will probably get more divergences than consensus on the boundaries of what constitutes youth. Nevertheless, to analyze solely from a class perspective obscures the important factor of generations. Taking into account the discursive context of youth as a category, it is still a useful unit of analysis to examine a transient social group straddling the lifeworlds of childhood and adulthood. he term “youth culture” was coined by Talcott Parsons in the early 1940s to describe a period when a decipherable generation undergoing a similar socialization process was generally becoming disenfranchised from the establishment. he general feeling is that, since the 1950s, the Western mass media and other institutions have constructed youth as the dominant culture. his results in a signiicant number of adults retaining what is considered “immature attitudes” well into their adult life. When the study of youth culture germinated in America in the 1950s and 1960s, sociologists of youth culture sought to explain the volatile times in the country as the United States underwent a period of sexual revolution, civil rights movement, and anti-Vietnam War protests. While Parsons saw youth culture as playing a positive role by “easing the diicult process of adjustment from childhood emotional dependency to full ‘maturity’” (Parsons 2010: 190), American sociologists tend to analyze youth culture along the lines of irresponsibility. Although Karl Mannheim (1952) had already given a sociopsychological analysis of the subject matter in his 1923 treatise, “he Problem of Generations,” it was in the United States that the study of youth culture lourished, with the production of quintessential works like James Coleman’s he Adolescent Society (1961), during what was probably the golden era of youth studies in the United States. he center of excellence in the study of young people moved to the United Kingdom in the 1970s. he Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) that was founded in 1964 became famous for its theorization of youth. Stuart Hall and Tony he Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social heory. Edited by Bryan S. Turner. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118430873.est0003 2 AD OL ESCENCE Jeferson’s edited book, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (1976) became a groundbreaking publication. Paul Willis (1977), in his study of working-class youth, asserted that youth from less aluent families end up reproducing the class system by resisting the “elevated” values and lessons in school. he problem with this is dual in nature. Social reproduction maintains inequalities in society due to the transfer of social, economic, and cultural capital in the form of language. As a result, inequalities perpetuate themselves. In the 1980s, Mike Brake’s twin publications of he Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures: Sex and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll? (1980) and Comparative Youth Culture: he Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada (1985) continued this tradition and are now considered classics in the ield. A long-standing criticism of those in this ield is that studies of adolescence and youth tend to almost always adopt a “social problem” perspective. Youth culture then becomes an external concept that is imposed upon a group of young people by laying a discursive ideological superstructure for any discussions of youth. Ater Jock Young irst mooted the concept of “moral panic” in 1971, Stanley Cohen, in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), pointed to the moral panic created by the labeling action of moral entrepreneurs. he major shortcoming of exploring cultural identity through the perspective of a “clash of cultures” framework, as demonstrated in studies on biculturalism, integration, and national identity, is the classiication of culture as a binary. Sociologists and anthropologists have argued for a long time about the amorphous nature of culture. To pit a “Muslim Lebanese culture” against an “American Christian culture,” for example, will simply ignore not only the clash within cultures but also gloss over the many intersections between two seemingly irreconcilable categories. Many contemporary works on adolescents look at the interstices of diferent lifeworlds, such as the transition from home to school and then to the workplace, as bringing particular distress to young people. Another publication, called Contemporary Youth Research: Local Expressions and Global Connections (Helve and Holme 2005), attempts to chart out the intricacies of young people living in a complex time that is characterized, among many others, by ages and generations, such as the Digital Age, Age of Immigration, MTV Generation, and the September 11 Generation. Hence, borrowing Durkheim’s concept of anomie, present scholars seek to comprehend the state of deregulation that adolescents experience in struggling to reconcile seemingly colliding values, not just as a transitionary group between childhood and adulthood, but also between overarching global processes. SEE ALSO: Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; Generation(s) REFERENCES Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. “Youth” Is Just a Word. In Sociology in Question, 94–102. London: SAGE. Brake, Mike. 1980. he Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures: Sex and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll? London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brake, Mike. 1985. Comparative Youth Culture: he Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada. London: Routledge. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: he Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Coleman, James Samuel. 1961. he Adolescent Society: he Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education. New York: Free Press. Hall, Stuart and Jeferson, Tony, eds. 1976. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson. AD OL ESCENCE Helve, Helena and Holm, Gunilla, eds. 2005. Contemporary Youth Research: Local Expressions and Global Connections. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Mannheim, Karl. 1952. he Problems of Generations. In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, edited by P. Kecskemeti, 276–323. London: Routledge. Parsons, Talcott. 2010. Essays in Sociological heory, rev. edn. New York: Free Press. 3 Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Aldershot, UK: Gower. FURTHER READING Dornbusch, Sanford M. 1989. he Sociology of Adolescence. Annual Review of Sociology, 15: 233–259.